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Mobile home rendered immobile in 4-foot hole

A couple in a pickup at Holiday Springs   RV Resort halt when the road opens beneath them. 

By JONATHAN ABEL
Published December 27, 2006

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Edmund D. Fountain] Deputy P.L. Flinn stands guard over a sinkhole that opened in the Holiday Springs RV Resort on Tuesday. A pickup with a camper drove over it, causing the road to collapse.

SPRING HILL - On the day after Christmas, in a soggy mist, the earth tried to swallow Carl Connell, his wife and their camper.

The couple was maneuvering their pickup-mounted camper down Travel Park Drive in southwest Hernando County when a sinkhole opened up beneath their front right tire.

"It was like a big building fell," said Linda Adams, 65, a neighbor who was looking out the kitchen window. "I told my husband, 'Lord, that truck just fell in that sinkhole.'"

She saw the Connells' bodies lurch forward and then stop. They got out of the vehicle calmly and looked around.

It was about 8:30 a.m.

Cecile Vouriot, 71, heard a terrible crunching sound and thought the camper had crashed into a building.

She came out to look. So did her neighbors.

This quiet one-lane street in the Holiday Springs RV Resort filled up with the curious.

They pointed at and photographed the stranded camper, the immobile mobile home.

They gasped as the two red tow trucks winched the truck free.

Then they shuffled to the edge of the 4-foot-deep hole, taking measure of the earth's exposed innards: an inch of asphalt on top of clay and sand.

Connell, a compact man of 52, stuck his head under his truck's front bumper when it finally had been freed. His wife shot a photo with a disposable camera.

No, he didn't want to talk about the accident.

This area of western Hernando and Pasco counties has suffered a number of serious sinkholes in the last year, including a small archipelago of holes in March that endangered 10 houses and closed parts of two roads. In 2001, as many as 65 sinkholes opened up in Hernando County.

But this sinkhole did not seem to be a threat to expand, according to a county worker who came by to take a look. The road is on private property, he said, so it is not even in the county's jurisdiction.

Sheriff's Deputy P.L. Flinn said the driver didn't do anything wrong and neither did the trailer park.

He wrote up the event as "an act of God."

[Last modified December 27, 2006, 06:50:13]